Paul Levinson, “Mcluhan and Media Ecology”

Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 1, 2000 17 McLuhan and Media Ecology Paul Levinson 1 HAT DID M ARSHALL M CLUHAN contribute to Media Ecology? W You might well ask what hydrogen and oxygen contribute to the existence of water. Without those elements, there would be no water. Of course, other factors are necessary. Hydrogen and oxygen on their own, in a vacuum, are not sufficient to create water. They are profoundly necessary, but not sufficient. Which describes McLuhan’s contribution to Media Ecology to a tee. Without his work in the 1950s and ’60s, there would be no field of study that sought to explain how the nuances and great sweeps of human history are made possible by media of communication—how media determine the thoughts and actions of people and society, in a “soft” way. Like how the elevator makes the skyscraper possible. Necessary to the very idea of a tall building (living and working on the top floors is impossible without a means of conveyance) but not sufficient (construction of a skyscraper requires certain engineering skills). McLuhan got us to the top floors of communications and taught us about the pervasively “soft” influence of media in all aspects of life. We might say that media are to human society as McLuhan is to Media Ecology. Come to think of it, McLuhan also taught us about the value of analogy in the investigation of media and their effects. But in the essay that follows, I’ll try to touch first upon some of the more major nonstylistic components of McLuhan’s contribution to our field. Communication Counts EDIA ARE CRUCIAL. We may read a book or watch TV or log on to the Web any evening, but these encounters are never—can never be—just one-night stands. M McLuhan saw that they change the way we live and who we are. And Media Ecology has taken up the task of detailing some of the many ways this has happened and will continue to happen. The explosion of the Internet with this-dot-com and that-dot-com everywhere you turn has made the importance of communication obvious. But it wasn’t always so. Indeed, the curriculum of Media Ecology, as I first encountered it in 1976, had a lot that was not first and foremost about communications. Lewis Mumford’s beat was technology; George Herbert Mead’s was expression of the self upon the world; Susanne Langer’s was aesthetics. Most of course were related, fundamentally, to communication. To inquire into the ways that music and writing play differently in the brain—as Langer did, to take her work as an example—is inescapably to look at the impact of different modes of communication. But one got the feeling, or at least I did, that 1 Paul Levinson is Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University, 431 Faculty Memorial Hall, 441 E. Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458 ([email protected]). Copyright ©2000 by Paul Levinson. All Rights Reserved 18 Paul Levinson communication was not quite her central concern. It was rather the scales of human perception and cognition and feeling, with communication serving as the stimulant and conduit. McLuhan’s work was startlingly distinct from the others in that he put communications at center stage. Indeed, in McLuhan’s schema, there was nothing else on the stage. Everything was communication. In Understanding Media (1964), he considered at least as many technologies as did Mumford, but each was rendered and explored as a medium of communication. Not only writing and printing were history-making media, as McLuhan’s mentor Harold Innis (whom I’d rate the second most important contributor to Media Ecology) had shown. Not only telephone and television, which Innis had missed (partly because Innis hadn’t focused on electronic media, partly because TV had barely come on the scene when Innis was working). But money, clothing, cars, and weapons were also critically important media in McLuhan’s book. In making everything about communication—in insisting that whether we pay for something with cash, check, or credit card says something about who we are, as George Herbert Mead might have noted (absent the credit card), had he been a Media Ecologist—McLuhan gave Media Ecology a center of gravity, a moral compass. There was no doubt in my mind in those Media Ecology seminars in 1976–1977 that McLuhan was the star, and everyone else whose books we read and discussed were planets, satellites, asteroids. Not that anyone was blinded by, obedient to, or worshipful of the star. Far from it. McLuhan was often criticized, sometimes vehemently, by us students of Media Ecology. His prose—his style of writing—received scarcely warmer acceptance in Media Ecology than it did in the rest of the academic world. (I actually had come to savor it by this time, but that was likely because I had gone through my period of frustration with McLuhan’s style when I’d first read Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) as an undergraduate at City College in New York City in the 1960s.) His “probes”—such as hot and cool—were hotly debated, coolly assessed, even experimentally tested by some hardy souls in our program. (I recall one experimental test of McLuhan’s notion of light-through/light-on by a PhD student in the class prior to mine.) But the point is—though McLuhan said he was too “acoustic” to have a point—that McLuhan and his point of view, whether about the significance of communication in general, or the cascade of things he observed about the impact of specific media, was the point of all of these debates, assessments, and tests. McLuhan was not the first theorist we studied, and that was probably a good idea. But once his work was introduced in our seminars, it became the touchstone—whether of foundation or contrast—to just about everything else that followed. This included the books that were published by graduates of the Media Ecology Program. Among my classmates’ books, Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (1985) has epigraphs by McLuhan and Erving Goffman. My Mind at Large: Knowing in the Technological Age (1988) is dedicated to McLuhan; my The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (1997) cites McLuhan as the first of four thinkers whose work made that book possible (the others are evolutionary epistemologist Donald T. Campbell, philosopher Karl Popper, and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov); my Digital McLuhan (1999) is—well, the title says it all. All were about communication, and informed in my American Heritage College Dictionary’s first sense of the word (“to give form or character to”) by the approach McLuhan brought to it. Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 1, 2000 McLuhan and Media Ecology 19 The Medium Counts EYOND THE COMPELLING, general principle that communication counts, McLuhan also taught us that the specific medium of communication makes a big difference. A Media B Ecology classmate once put it this way: We study how whether one writes with a squiggle this way or that way can change the course of civilization. That might have been overstating the case just a bit. I’d say that whether one writes with a squiggle (i.e., the alphabet) or a picture (i.e., hieroglyphics) can and indeed did change the course of civilization. But the point is well taken either way, for what it gets at is McLuhan’s “medium is the message”—the way we communicate, often taken for granted, often determines what we communicate, and therein just about everything else in life and society. Media Ecology was very much about making that distinction. Other programs, such as the Annenberg School in Philadelphia, were also vitally concerned with communication. But their idea of communication studies was mainly analysis of content. In investigating the possible relationship between television and violence, their approach was to look for correlations between numbers of violent episodes in TV programs and numbers of violent acts committed by their viewers. In contrast, McLuhan wondered to what extent the tantalization of untouchable, beautiful images on TV engendered real-life frustration. And that was what Media Ecology was interested in, too. Neil Postman, who wisely created Media Ecology in so much of McLuhan’s image, was the one most responsible for our focus on media, technology, process, and structure, rather than content. And this resulted in other structuralists, implicit and explicit, ranging from Whorf to Levi-Strauss to Chomsky, being brought into the curriculum. But McLuhan was the signpost. And he was a signpost that pointed, Janus-like, at the past and the future at the same time. History Counts WIGHT M ACDONALD observed, in the title of his article about McLuhan in Stearn’s McLuhan: Hot & Cool (1967), that McLuhan “has looted all culture, from cave D painting to Mad magazine, for fragments to shore up against the ruin of his system” (p. 204). Typical of McLuhan’s critics, Macdonald is keenly aware of McLuhan’s encyclopedic conversance with the myriad details of history—for how else would McLuhan know where to “loot”—but Macdonald attempts to twist this advantage into some kind of flaw. Media Ecology was inspired by merely the advantage. Indeed, the study of media and their effects now seems intrinsically historical mainly because of McLuhan (and his mentor Innis), and the furthering of that approach in Media Ecology. Even before the Web, back in the 1970s, most graduate programs that studied communications and media were pointed towards the future.

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